Traditionally you would be naked in the sauna, but don't worry, it's not obligatory.
"Sauna is individual. If you have a towel or your swimsuit or if you are naked, it's up to you," Svante Spolander, co-founder of Sweden's Bastuakademien sauna club, told The Local.
"Younger people in Sweden are really shy – I think it's this thing with mobile phones and filming. They are, like, scared of it, but we say that it's up to you."
In a public sauna in a swimming pool, some people in Sweden now wear swimsuits. It's also normal to bring a large towel to cover yourself up with as you come back from a cooling dip in a lake or a shower. Even purists will bring a small towel to sit on.
That being said, swimsuits are often completely banned from public saunas – this is because the chlorine used in the water at swimming pools can cause health and breathing issues when it vaporises. It is still OK to wrap the towel around you if you’re uncomfortable.
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But despite the nudity, anything romantic is a no no.
"No, never. Not that," Spolander says. "That the weird thing. Somehow people that are not used to sauna think that nakedness means sex. Nakedness is the sauna is about total cleaning."
Touching in a non-sexual way does however sometimes happen. Saunas can get very crowded, with 20 or more people squeezed into a space the size of a bathroom, so it can be impossible to avoid some physical contact with the person on the bench next to you.
For Spolander, the way this forces you to drop your physical boundaries is part of the appeal.
"Sometimes it's quite funny when there are a lot of people. It's like in a football game, it's little crowded, but you have fun together. In the sauna museum that I look after, we have what we call a village sauna, and you can be 60 people when we pack it."
It might also be OK to wipe some of the sweat off a loved one, or even scrub them. "My father, when he got older, had a friend that when they went in the sauna, they always helped each other to wash each other's backs. They scrubbed each other."
In a sauna club or when using the sauna with friends and family, there will probably be a higher extent of touching than between strangers in, say, a public sauna in the gym or the local swimming pool. And it goes without saying that unwanted physical contact is never OK.
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